Parashat Ki Teitzei פָּרָשַׁת כִּי־תֵצֵא

Ki Teitzei is actually one of our favorite parshiyot, why? It is full of mitzvot!  More than 12% of the 613 mitzvot command us to obey.  But the opening of Ki Teitzei may seem completely irrelevant to our daily existence. That opening reads...

“Ki tetzei lamilcham al oiyecha, unesana Hashem Elokecha beyadecha veshavisa sivyo.”  

“When you take the field against your enemies, and the Lord your God delivers them into your power, and you take some of them captive. . . “

And the rest of the Aliyah goes on to describe the rules for taking a beautiful woman captive and whether you can marry her and how long you have to wait if you DO want to marry her. Now I don’t think anyone here is worried about taking women captive in wartime.  So, we may be inclined to dismiss this passage as part of another era, as something that is no longer—and happily no longer—relevant to our lives. Or—as I think Mary Belgard suggested a couple of years ago, this passage is truly ICKY.

Ironically, some argue that this passage shows that Judaism, in our long-ago past, was concerned with treating women with respect.  But many of us might think that that’s stretching it.  So, we are left thinking that the passage is either embarrassing OR irrelevant.  BUT let me try to convince you that there might be another alternative.

To do so, I want to take a little poetic license with one of the Hebrew words in the opening of the passage—the word is VESHAVISA.  The root of that word is SH’V’H—to take captive, and that gives the pasuk—the verse—its literal sense.  But—and here’s the poetic license—doesn’t that root also look like something else?  That something else is SH’U’V—to RETURN.  Another possible translation might be to “take back.”

So, let’s think about that in the context of the month of Elul.  We are getting ever closer to the High Holy Days, and we know that those days are a period of time when we look inward, when we ask ourselves what we could have done differently, whom we have hurt, and how we can be better people in the year ahead. What keeps us from being the best people that we can be? I think we all know the answer to that question. 

It is the YETZER HARA—the evil voice inside of each of us that is always tempting us to go astray, to take the path of least resistance, to cheat on our goals.  That yetzer hara is constantly trying to take the US captive, to hold us in its spell.  But if we think about this passage in Ki Tetzei, we might imagine a kind of war between good and evil in each one of us.  Who will win that war?  Can we “recapture” our goodness, can we wrest that righteousness from the dark forces of self-destruction that lie within each one of us? 

The forces of evil are clever and powerful.  They can hold us “CAPTIVE,” SHIVYO.  They can even appear, superficially, to be beautiful. Otherwise, why would we be tempted?  But we can’t be fooled by surface appearances.  Beauty fades, and sin is never as satisfying as we imagine that it will be.  So, let’s think about this concept as we approach the holidays. Let’s use Shabbat as a time for heightened awareness and as preparation for the awesome days to come.  Let’s remember that beauty--THE SURFACE—fades over time. But INTEGRITY—what lies BELOW the surface—cannot be muted by time or place.

You can enhance your coming Shabbat by attending this Friday evening and being part of the shul community, as well as on Shabbat morning.